SDK Product Solver Support

By DE Editors

Frontline Systems (Incline Village, NV and in Bury St. Edmunds, UK) isshipping Version 7.0 of its Solver Platform SDK (software developmentkit.). Solver Platform SDK features new support for 64-bit Windows,32-bit and 64-bit Linux, Visual Studio 2005 and Microsoft .NET 2.0, andMATLAB. Additionally, the company reports significant enhancements toits Monte Carlo simulation capabilities.

The Solver Platform SDK makes Frontline’s full suite of Solvers foroptimization and Monte Carlo simulation available to developers usingsuch platforms and languages as COM and .NET, Java, and MATLAB, as wellas C/C#/C++, Visual Basic/VB.NET, and others.  Unlike other"callable library” optimizers, the SDK is said to feature easy-to-use “wizards"to help developers get started quickly, as well as new object-oriented API(application programming interface) said to enhance developerproductivity greatly.

Solver Platform features five bundled Solver Engines for optimizationand simulation, including a Simplex Solver for linear, quadratic, andmixed integer problems of up to 8,000 variable. Its Barrier Solver forquadratically constrained and second order cone programming problemscan handle up to 2,000 variables, while the GRG Nonlinear Solver is forsmooth nonlinear problems up to 500 variables. The Evolutionary Solverhandles arbitrary non-smooth problems of up to 500 variables.

Version 7.0 further extends the Monte Carlo simulation capabilities ofthe Solver Platform SDK with a new, high-level Distribution object inits object-oriented API that computes probability density andcumulative probability functions. It supports shifting and truncationof distributions, and automatically fits distributions and theirparameters to user-supplied sample data for a wide range of commonlyused probability distributions.

Solver Platform offers both its object-oriented API and its proceduralAPI for MATLAB. Version 7.0 adds a new API that’s compatible with theMATLAB Optimization Toolbox.

A single-user Windows or Linux development license for the SolverPlatform SDK is $1,495 plus 33% required first-year annual support perconfiguration (32-bit or 64-bit), which drops to 20% after theapplication is developed and deployed.  Concurrent userdevelopment licenses are also available.  Single-user runtimelicenses start at half the cost of development licenses; flexibleconcurrent use, capacity-based runtime licenses are also available. Toregister for a free trial version, click here. For completedetails, click here.

Sources: Press materials received from the company. Additional information gleaned from the company’s website.